Best Language for Beginner Programmers?

jahardman asks: "I work at a High School that has recently seen a decline in the number of students that want to take our entry level-programming course in Visual Basic. We have been toying with the idea of having the introduction course be in PHP or Ruby on Rails; but are not convinced that they lead well into higher level languages. Does anyone out there have suggestions as to what would be a better language to start students with? Ideally one that might be more 'enticing' as well?"

Comments

My answer

[Omnifarious]

I don't know about Ruby on Rails, but I strongly agree with you about PHP and VB. I think they both lead poorly to working in other languages.

I would recommend Python, because I'm more familiar with it than Ruby. It has a clear, elegant syntax, and many concepts in it exist in other languages as well.

But, Ruby may be perfectly adequate as well. I know that most concepts that exist in Python that aren't particularly language specific have counterparts in Ruby.

I used to recommend assembly, then scheme, just so all the people who entered thinking they were programmer hotshots because they knew BASIC, VB or C or something would find themselves in deep water and having to learn something new.

But I suspect that's a bit overly hostile. Depends on the environment of course. Still might be a good idea for people going to a hard-to-get-into technical school to knock them down a peg or two and convince them that there's stuff they don't know.

Python

[MBCook]

Python. Python has everything you need and then some. It runs on every platform (Linux and OS X boxes already have it installed), and it's free.

Python (through the use of forced whitespace) forces them to learn to write more readable code (I remember taking C++ in high-school, the stuff people wrote would make your eyes bleed). The language has everything your students might need for intro programming (for loops, functions, etc). If they want to continue on will Python later (or you want to offer advanced classes later) it has bindings for all sorts of stuff (XML, OpenGL, QT, GTK, and many many other things). It also has all sorts of handy stuff like an interactive interpreter, a "for each" loop, and more. It's object oriented too.

Look into Python. It's easy to use and would make a great stepping stone if they want to later use a language like C/C++/Java. Or (as I said) Python is great in and of its self and they can stick with it.

Would you like to play a game?

[losman]

In school kids have objectives that are more short term. Graduating, having fun and being creative are common examples of that. As educators you have more long term objectives for the kids. Preparing them for college or the professional world being prime examples of that. The answer to your question is somewhere in the middle.

If I wanted to interest kids in programming and teach them something useful I would try something like a course in Unreal Tournament editing or some other game that has a well defined scripting language. Yes it is a game but the scripting language is very C like in nature. And let's be honest you should really be focusing on teaching them how to analyze, break down and solve problems progamatically regardless of the language. Teach them that and then let them decide if it is something they want to pursue.

Another great aspect of teaching a course this way is that it shows them both the difficulty and the rewards of programming. It is not easy to create good levels in these games. They have to learn to handle various types of media as well as programming the main logic. As a great bonus they end up with something they all can play with in the end.

Any how, this kind of idea is not for a conservative environment and if you are in that situation then teach them Java and emphasize object oriented development. If your environment is a bit more progressive then I would look at the gaming route.

Java, then assembly language

[MobyDisk]

Here's my qualifications for choosing Java, then Assembly:

Java:
- Is not too verbose (Hello World is not daunting)
- Any algorithm can be reasonably implemented
- Any structure can be reasonably represented
- No low-level complications like pointers
- Supports modern programming techniques like functional and O-O
- The student can do real-world things in it
- The student can experiment at home for free

Don't forget assembly!!
- Too many new programmers need to do something low-level, or interoperate with another language, and they have no concept how memory is arranged, what source code compiles down into, or even what a compiler does! They don't comprehend that a string isn't an intrinsic thing the CPU recognizes, and that there are hundreds of ways to store and manipulate them. So when they have to learn about memory-thrashing, multithreading, garbage-collection, optimization, etc. they are lost.

This must be taught this very early on, not as an advanced course, so that when they learn other lagnauges and algorithms they can see where it comes from.

Re:Pascal WAS a language designed for teaching

[fireweaver]

Personally, I am a fan of Wirth-style languages, so I would recommend Modula-2 (successor to Pascal with a cleaner syntax), or Oberon (successor to Modula that adds objects and garbage collection). Although I'd stay away from the native Oberon programming environment since it is quite unlike the environment most of us are familiar with (Windows and its look-alikes). Both of these languages, like Pascal were designed for instruction, but are powerful enough to be used in production environments.

Re:Why not C?

[Better Than Bacon]

When I first started with Java/VB, I found programming to be really hard. I decided to learn assembly/C++ and, just like dasunt said, I think they taught me how computers really work.

Once I knew that everything is a just a number (pointers, instructions, everything) and that memory is just one big linear array, nothing was a mystery anymore -- I could figure out what the compilers and other languages were really doing. This put me way ahead of average programmers my age until 4th year university when they forced everyone else to learn that stuff.

To be a good programmer I think you have to understand how computer really work, and C/assembly is the best way to pull back the curtain and be confident that you can get anything to work.

On a related note, when people are teaching object oriented C++ to beginners, it's common to focus on the high level stuff (encapsulation, polymorphism). What I'd like to see is for them to mix in a little bit of "and here's how you would implement polymorphism in C" -- then people see how it all comes together. Er, well, that's what I think :~)